Category: 2017

Old soldiers, it says in the Oxford Book of Idioms, or wherever else you look them up, never die. It has come to our notice, amid the tolling of alarm bells for those who choose to timely hear them, that of late they’ve also developed a tendency to refuse to fade away. Didn’t you hear of that Jarnail sitting across the fence in neighbouring Bakistan? Have you not made yourself fully aware of the dire peril we are faced with? Do you not lend your ear (and any other or all of your body parts should the need arise) to the DeeaahLeeder? Has nobody told you it is your national duty to pay heed, homage, attention, respect, obeisance, cess, surcharge, income tax, entertainment tax, goods and services tax, and sundry tributes?

Jaago Mohan Pyaare, the wanton delinquencies of NothingHappened are over, banished, like the thousand rupee note, by imperious decree. Wake up and prostrate yourself to new requirements, conform, don’t question. Are you anti-national? Those hostile Jarnails from across have hatched a dark plot and chickens haven’t emerged from it. Pigeons have. They are being sent across in daring droves, surveillance cams stitched into their wings, their feet strapped with sensors, their beaks ferrying sinister missives. Pigeons that fly in from the west don’t take off with olive branches. They’re olive green, OG in military parlance. And now they’re overhead, in a macabre flap of wings. All it took that Jarnail was a forefinger jab on Facebook: Post! Danger got deployed all over us. And you thought he was retired, that Jairnail, feeding benign birds in his aviary? Just because Mahadeb wasn’t at his appointed station to confirm the peril to you over your morning tumbler of tea? HoyNaKi? (Which in other geographies would translate to either convey utter astonishment or the sense that what’s been posited is unacceptable.) You don’t believe the DeeaahLeeder? HoyNaKi?

Someone asked where is Vikas. Then someone replied Vikas has become the subject of a missing person report. Like Mahadeb. There’s more concern scudding about than just over Mahadeb. Are you listening, Mahadeb? You might be well advised to learn not everybody’s riveted on your absence, so if this disappearance is the collateral consequence of some attention deficit disorder you suffer from, end the charade. Come out of it. There are enough around your shack thirsting for tea, gaping morosely at shattered remains of the last bhaanrs you served out and which lie crushed so fully that they have begun to resemble the ego of a juggernaut that lost his jugger and had no option but to hold up the naut as prize. Meantime, the search for Vikas is on in earnest.

But it turns out that it’s a most malicious and malevolent canard that Vikas is missing, just the kind of spurious concoction that votaries of NothingHappened specialise in. Vikas is everywhere, perhaps you can’t see it, that’s your problem. You can’t see God, that cannot mean God isn’t there. God is everywhere. And so is Vikas.

You thought the naut was anything but the result of Vikas? Yes, the jugger was lost, but that was on account of the wicked conspiracies brokered between the forces of HAJistan and Bakistan by PappuPaasAaGaya and his lowly (also known as neech) agents. They were plotting in league with those retired Jarnails across the fence whose specialty it is to topple regimes. And it usually takes a conspiracy at the very least, which is what they had on the table that dark and secret dinner night. But that table has been turned and all has turned out well in the end. TheBossOfAllThings still wears the crown of naut and that is the gift of Vikas. Vikas has been the story since NothingHappened was banished.

Then notes were banished. DirtyMoney was banished. Cash vanished, and beggars bought POS tabs. The nation became the shape of a queue and began to trek towards Vikas, that many splendoured, omnipresent thing we have come to be blessed with. En route, we learnt many things about our real selves, and all of those were about Vikas.

For instance, if you wear a certain kind of headwear – just the kind that TheBossOfAllThings refuses to – you are likely to be mobbed, then possibly also lynched. Vikas. Or, in case you didn’t yet know, Ganesha was the construct of plastic surgery. Vikas. Maharana Pratap vanquished Jalaluddin Akbar at Haldighati, upon which Akbar retreated to Agra and tamely proceeded with the consolidation of the Mughal empire. Maharana Pratap, rooted ruler of the masses, celebrated his victory with chapatis made out of jungle grass. Vikas. The airbrushing of fraudulent history is a work in progress. We shall soon establish that the Taj Mahal is actually TejoMahal. Vikas. Meanwhile, the practice run on capturing domes (three were done in Ayodhya this month a quarter century ago) has resumed; a bhagwa was recently mounted atop a courthouse in Rajasthan. Vikas. We don’t need “their” votes. Vikas. We wear monogrammed pinstripes. Vikas. We change dresses every photo-op. Vikas. We have exchanged khadi for Fendi. Vikas. For the first time ever, an Indian hot air balloon rode piggy on a seaplane. Vikas. We have finally begun to openly deify the killer of the Mahatma. Vikas. We have acquired the capability to disguise MadeInChina as MakeInIndia. Vikas. We are going to run a bullet train so expensive its going to cost double the flight costs, but we can now afford it. Vikas. We have linked birth, death and everything in between to Aadhar. Vikas.

We will soon by law rob depositors of their life savings. Vikas.

We have the ability to shut and open Parliament as and when convenient. Vikas.

We have now achieved an Election Commission that listens and obeys. This happened briefly during NothingHappened as well, but now we have made victory of people’s will (which solely resides in TheBossOfAllThings) over such autonomies complete. Vikas. Actually, it is such a blessed thing TheMessiah finally arrived and revealed to us the truth about the derelictions of NothingHappened. That’s Vikas.

December 6th, 2017: Down one of several stone-flagged lanes that toddle off Marienplatz, Munich town hall plaza, there still operates a rather prosperous enterprise called the Hofbrauhaus. It’s one of several kindred addresses around the area pledged to the central Bavarian celebration – the ooze and oomph of beer. They are all, each one of them, establishments of gregarious hubbub – voluptuous symphonies bound about their high-arched halls, beermaids shuffle about the tables with their jugfuls, decanting foaming oceans of the house brew. The floors tinkle, with glass and unrestrained merriment.

Hofbrauhaus is one of them and a little apart. It is patronized for more than just its beer and knucklewurst. Hofbrauhaus is where Adolf Hitler made his first address to the Nazi party in 1920. Through the flaming decades that followed, Hofbrauhaus remained a celebration of Nazi ways and values, and that’s partly what gets Hofbrauhaus its bloated clientele today. It’s a slice of Hitler. But a forbidden slice. You’ll find no trace of him or his creed. Nobody so much as whispers Adolf on the precincts, god forbid Hitler, or actually German law. Germany has institutionalized provisions called Volksverhetzung, or incitement of hatred, which prohibit all Nazi symbols, totems, hate speech, incitement, anything that is a reminder of Hitler. It’s a custom strictly adhered to in Germany.

It comes from the fear and the determination of no repetitions.

It comes from regret that’s yet unrelieved.

Most of all, it comes from a deep and collective sense of shame at the unspeakable horrors Germany and Germans once feistily brought upon. Nie Wieder, never again.

Regret can relieve wrongdoing; it implies admission of turpitude and, more pertinently, an undertaking of corrections and probably also a pledge of no repetitions.

In the 25 years since Ayodhya’s Babri Masjid was razed, our discourse has been hauled in the opposite direction – from shuddering shame to the discarding of that shame and the adoption of audacities that undermine the fundamental underpinnings of India and its Constitution.

There is nothing as loud as the sound of wrongdoing being hushed. Nor anything as revelatory as a cover-up. The more covers you commission and deploy the bigger the body of evidence becomes. The harder you hush over something, the more you are heard. Don’t believe me? Come spend a while at Mahadeb’s, even though he’s still gone. It’s come to matter less and less that he isn’t there. His air is. It’s a place that all winds cross, and on their wings arrive intimations.

Someone died. Someone important. Someone sitting over an important matter – as important as possible murder. Then it began to dawn that he may not have died. He may have himself been murdered. Everybody’s talking about it at Mahadeb’s: Did you know? But didn’t you? But, hush, nobody’s naming names because UnmentionablePeople may be involved. UnmentionablePeople meaning mention them and, well, you don’t wish unmentionable things happening to you, do you? See how careful I am being. Learn. And please take due note, PuppyLove and NumberToo, I have not named any names. I am a careful character, clean as a barrel after bullets have been shot into intended places.

Mahadeb is not a historical character, at least not yet. Don’t assume his absence for permanence. He’s gone, but he isn’t history yet. One day, inevitably he will be, but that will be another day. Everything becomes history, even iPhones. A time will come when that time will be gone.

So will Mahadeb be one day. History. He is, and therefore he won’t be. Am I overstating myself? I would think not. For even what’s not history is becoming history. As Jalaluddin Akbar’s defeat at the hands of Maharana Pratap at Haldighati. As Akbar’s rollicking love for a void called Jodha. Or the raging Khilji obsession with Padmini, neither princess nor Rajasthani nor Rajput, but the caprice of an inventive poet scribbling away at a fair remove in Jais, Rae Bareli, Uttar Pradesh. Malik Mohammed Jayasi was real enough, but he wrote unreal things. He was no historian. He’s only making history as we go along.

Who is she,
This Rashtramata,
And if she is she,
Then who art thou, O, Bharatmata?

Last fortnight, I spent some time in Kashmir, trying to sample opinion on the Centre’s new effort to open dialogue.

Dineshwar Sharma landed here last week as a text message. A couple of days before New Delhi’s newest emissary to Kashmir presented his person to the Valley, telephones of local notables began to simultaneously ping – mainstream and separatist politicians, opinion leaders in the media, academia and the bar, hand-picked retired civil servants, all from a list of numbers that Sharma had been handed. ‘Could we meet? Want to talk? I’m coming,’ is how Sharma was sounding out his target audience.

The response he received was, to put it mildly, lukewarm, especially insufficient in dropping early winter temperatures. Separatists rejected the overture out of hand; mainstream entities like Omar Abdullah of the National Conference showed little eagerness, settling down for a ‘private call on’ only because Sharma had gone knocking his door; among others in the intelligentsia, few obliged, opting to sense the depth and drift of Sharma’s enterprise before they revealed their minds. Those that arrived at his heavily secured VVIP perch at Hari Niwas – many dozen delegations, authentic and adulterated – had mostly been herded and nudged to Sharma’s presence by administrative fiat. On the eve of Sharma’s arrival, the office of Divisional Commissioner Basheer Khan, occupied itself shooting off directives to any outfit worth the name to present themselves to Sharma – Bakerwal and Gujjar tribesmen, boatmen, tour operators, hoteliers, motley sets of tillers, women’s and youth groups, government-funded NGOs, even a dubious crew of young journalists nobody seemed to know existed. As Sharma laboured on in his exclusive bungalow, trying to shore up respectable numbers of the interested, The Telegraph spoke to a cross-section of those not on his telephone log – young unaligned professionals who remain invested in Kashmir and count among stakeholders as any other. This is what they had to say on New Delhi’s latest venture:

Rashid Rather, Sociologist: Kashmiris love talking, we’ve been talking since 1947. The issue is what about. To me the problem here is not about how to deal with separatists, it is how Delhi has dealt with mainstream parties, right from Sheikh Abdullah to Farooq Abdullah to the present generation of leaders. They have been pressed to the wall. Delhi has failed the Kashmiri mainstream consistently, it was made to fail before the Kashmiri people to a point that it had no credibility left. From Indira Gandhi to Rajiv to P.V. Narasimha Rao to Atal Bihari Vajpayee, everybody made promises and turned on them. That is what has created the space for separatists. There were always separatist pockets here, but they were pockets. New Delhi-inspired failures of the mainstream have expanded the separatist constituency. My message to New Delhi is: don’t be bothered about separatists, look at how you have treated the mainstream, how you have manipulated and emaciated it. But they are not prepared to learn any lessons, they are going on repeating the same mistakes. They have played with the mainstream leadership. Such a record inspires no confidence in us. The new emissary has met many so-called delegations, nearly 40 in two days, but is this a railway platform? What is he trying to do meeting so many delegations in such a short time? Are we to take this seriously? It has become a joke. Please do not come to Kashmir without examining your own record, it will serve no purpose. Go back, introspect and if you realise you’ve made mistakes, a start can probably be made.

Not everything can be about Mahadeb. Not when he has forsaken his calling, left his votaries forlorn and proceeded on furlough with no forwarding address or the faintest idea with anybody on when he may return. If that. Chaiwalas can’t do that. There are obligations that come with the job. Look at other chaiwalas, or The Chaiwala. Does he leave your side even when you might want him to? Never. He is there, at the throw of the television switch, harnessed live to cause and country, relentlessly serving chai. In the process, serving the nation.

Mahadeb has behaved badly. But while he is missing, we shan’t remain in unanimated suspension around the void he’s left behind. Attached to his bereft cart, after all, is a whole nation lumbering under the rank deficits of NothingHappened. The situation’s worse; we are beset by catastrophic prospects. Correction is required, we need to move. Nothing needs to be replaced with Something. NewIndia’s calling. And thank heavens there’s somebody heeding that call with all the urgency and innovation it requires, laying out the road ahead, picking out the pitfalls.

What would have become of us if we hadn’t been recently alerted to the rife and fatal perils of termites?

Nobody bothered warning us all this while what an apocalyptic end termites have been plotting. We are teetering on a hollowed out precipice and nobody told us. Such were the reckless botch-ups of the epoch justly called NothingHappened. All through NothingHappened, termites happened, and they were allowed to continue happening. As their nomenclature vaguely suggests, termites terminate. We were being voraciously had. But since we have given unto ourselves TheBossOfAllThings, he’s given unto us reason to feel secure. He’s let out the war cry: Exterminate before they terminate.